Every system trends toward disorder unless energy is continuously applied to maintain it. This applies to organic, mechanical, or organizational systems. Design Systems are no different. The moment you stop actively maintaining coherence, the system starts decaying. Components drift out of sync. Teams build workarounds. Documentation stagnates and rots. Consistency erodes one “just this once” at a time.

Many of the ways design systems fail are expressions of this force. They trace back to entropy accelerating faster than the organization can counteract it. The rest create the conditions that let entropy in. I’m exploring fourteen of these failure modes through the lens of small product teams, where the sustained energy required to fight entropy is hardest to come by.

Failure Modes

Mentioned in no particular order.

• The Component Library Fallacy: Components without governance, principles, or feedback loops are a parts catalog, not a system.
• No Executive Sponsorship: Without C-level championship, the system can’t secure sustained resources or cross-departmental authority.
• Siloed Ownership: Engineering-only ownership produces a dev tool; design-only ownership produces a brand tool; neither delivers the cross-functional promise.
• Building Too Much Too Soon: Over-building in isolation before piloting against real product needs produces systems that are “book smart” but not “street smart.”
• The Adoption Gap: If the system is harder to use than a team’s current workflow, rational actors will avoid it.
• No Governance Model: Without defined processes for contribution and decision-making, teams customize inconsistently and the system fragments.
• One-Time Investment: Systems treated as projects with endpoints rather than products requiring continuous investment stop evolving and start dying.
• Design-Code Drift: When Figma libraries and coded components fall out of sync, trust erodes and teams can’t tell which version is canonical.
• Vague Success Criteria: Amorphous goals like “Better UX” and “more consistency” aren’t measurable; without demonstrable metrics, funding erodes.
• The Communication Gap: Handoff is a conversation problem masquerading as a tooling problem.
• Overcomplexity: Over-engineered systems with verbose documentation about obvious elements feel burdensome; teams abandon them for simpler alternatives.
• The Politics Nobody Names: Adoption battles are political battles fought by people whose autonomy is threatened.
• The Failure Mode of Success: The system works and becomes a bottleneck; governance inverts from “please use this” to “please stop requesting things.”
• The Designer Identity Crisis: Design is not art. Designers who built their identity around visual creation feel deskilled by systems; designers who built it around solving user problems feel relieved.

These aren’t fourteen isolated problems. They compound. Missing sponsorship starves governance, which accelerates drift, which kills adoption. Each failure mode doesn’t just damage the system directly; it reduces the organization’s capacity to resist the next one. Entropy doesn’t need all fourteen. It just needs the compounding to start. The question isn’t whether your system will face these forces. It will. The question is which ones are already running and what it takes to counteract them. That’s where I’m going next.